Overcoming poverty
AS claimed by Chinese President Xi Jinping, China has indeed performed the miracle of the modern age, by lifting up nearly 100 million people out of extreme poverty.
President Xi had made poverty eradication the main plank of his policy since coming to power in 2012.
This sterling example of China is indeed a great example for many developing countries around the world including Pakistan.
It would indeed be very profitable for us as Pakistanis to examine some of the measures that China took in achieving this great feat in history.
Some international economists assert that China has set up too low a bar in its definition of poverty. Poverty in Chinese context means extreme poverty in rural areas.
The threshold of coming out of extreme poverty has been set up at $1.69 a day, which is close to the World Bank’s $1.90 estimation of poverty line.
When some experts criticize the threshold as very low, the Chinese government answers that their threshold is higher than global average once adjusted for purchasing power parity (PPP).
Similarly, there are doubts in the minds of some international observers that this amazing victory against extreme poverty may not be sustainable.
To my mind, issues like poverty identification threshold and sustainability of poverty eradication initiative may be appropriate subjects for academic and polemical discussions.
The more important issue for us, however, is the process and mechanism through which China achieved this great wonder.
China’s great anti-poverty initiative was based largely on the initiative being precise and targeted.
The Chinese Government assembled and dispatched about 255,000 village based working teams consisting three million civil servants and workers of the Communist Party of China (CPC) to 832 impoverished counties and thousands of poor villages.
These workers created a profile of every poor person in the country based on four touch-stones: family income, housing condition, medical facilities or lack thereof and weather any member of the family had dropped out of school.
The workers thus used the data from this survey to identify the individuals and households living in extreme poverty with some accuracy.
This data base also helped the officials to identify the cause of poverty of most individuals and households.
The various conditions of poverty were analyzed by the poverty eradication officials and tailor-made solutions were tried to be provided to various segments of the population according to their special needs.
If a family was poor because of lack of education of its members, the proposed solution was student loans and subsidies.
Similarly, if poor health of family members was the real reason for poverty, suitable health-care facilities were provided to them.
The government workers lived and interacted with these poor communities in 832 impoverished counties.
This helped the officials to better understand the difficulties of the community and how to help them.
The poor people were taught how to shoulder responsibilities for poverty alleviation, and how programs could be developed that best suited the lifestyles of these communities.
The idea behind this policy was to harness local talent to manage local industries and social welfare projects.
This had the salubrious effect of preventing local people from migrating to big cities, as decent jobs were made available at their doorsteps.
All of these impoverished counties put in place about 3,000,000 bases in industry, farming and processing.
Over 96 million people were shifted to 2.66 million newly constructed houses equipped with water, electricity and internet. China completely factored in the environmental quality in its fight against poverty.
Solar power was used for agriculture in many poor counties and over one million local people were employed as ecological ranges. This helped in increasing employment as well as climatic sensitivity.
Internet connectivity and e-commerce related services connected the poor countries with the global market.
China followed a very flexible policy in fighting poverty by regularly calibrating rural development strategies with rapidly evolving socio-economic situations.
China had to spend over $800 billion to achieve the goal of eradicating poverty. She could not take the risk of falling back into poverty.
China thus spent massively in the education and health sectors. 100,000 schools were up-graded and the school dropout rates were drastically reduced.
About 200,000 students were induced to resume their education. Free vocational education was provided to over eight million students from poor families.
Similarly, almost 99 percent of impoverished counties were provided with basic medical insurance that covered up to 80% of the cost of hospitalization.
The life expectancy of the Chinese people was thus raised from 35 years in 1949 to about 77 years in 2020. Farm mechanization services helped small farmers with mechanizing their cultivation.
Cooperative organizations provided a range of services to connect small farmers to markets and introduced them to the latest technologies through training and input supply.
These institutional innovations may be relevant for many countries including Pakistan with small and fragmented land holding structures.
Lastly, social protection was another factor that immensely helped eradicate rural poverty from China.
Rural health insurance and pension have been a distinctive feature of rural China which has considerably helped bridge the gap between the rural and urban social protection systems.
Pakistan, which has struggled with complex problems of poverty can certainly benefit from certain aspects of the Chinese example.
—The writer, based in Islamabad, is a former Health Minister of KP.
